Festival of Speed’s new Future Lab goes driverless

Star of the show is Robocar, the world’s first driverless electric racing car

Festival of Speed (FOS) is set to showcase new technological concepts in automobiles and aviation in the new FOS Future Lab feature.

At the event, held from 29 June to 2 July, visitors will be able to interact with a showcase of what the future of transport might look like. The star of the show is Robocar [pictured], the world’s first driverless electric racing car, designed by Daniel Simon (Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, Captain America).

Alongside will be exhibits from the future of flight, with Flying cars from NeoXCraft, a British designed product, engineered and built by VRCO. This concept is for a future private, luxury flying road vehicle, in a quadcopter style. It is an example of vertical take off and landing craft, which are influencing the future of private land-to-air transport solutions today.

Additionally, PAL-V ONE (Personal Air and Land Vehicle), a vehicle design that combines a gyrocopter with tricycle undercarriage will also be on display alongside Solar and supersonic planes from Boom Supersonic. Boom Technology is making a supersonic airliner faster than Concorde, yet so efficient that tickets will be affordable to the average airplane passenger. The plane will fly at a speed of 2.2 Mach, so has the potential to take passengers from New York to London in three hours 15 minutes. A new 8 foot model of the passenger craft will be on show with a virtual reality (VR) experience so visitors can ‘walk through’ the future plane interior.

Plus there will be the HTC Vive x BBC Space Walk for visitors to interact with, which is an award winning VR experience commissioned by the BBC that allows users to float around outside the International Space Station; and HTC Vive x Tilt Brush, a three-dimensional drawing tool in VR, which allows the user to draw in beams of light within the app environment.

About Smart Chimps

Smart Chimps is the creation of freelance editor, writer and media trainer, Heather McLean. Heather has been involved in telecoms journalism since 2001, specialising in mobile since 2002. Find out more